Deaths and Casualties We Refuse to Contemplate Today

That is until some damn fool Islamic Terrorist Decides he wants to trade his A-Bomb for Virgins. m/r

"To man a trench and live among the lice..." :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn
Gallipoli One Hundred Years On
April 24, 2015

All things considered, today's Commonwealth service marking the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings was moving and dignified. It was Winston Churchill's idea to open up a new front in the Great War as "an alternative to chewing barbed wire in Flanders". It proved to be one of the worst disasters in 20th century imperial history: By the end, the British and Ottoman empires had lost roughly the same number of men - about 200,000 apiece. On the invading side, the dead numbered 34,072 from the British Isles, 8,709 from Australia, 2,721 from New Zealand, 1,358 from India, and 49 from the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (the only North American participants) - plus 9,798 of Britain's French allies. Those numbers do not include death from illness. In the botched landings, the sea ran red. In the carnage of the metropolitan power's miscalculations, a post-colonial Australia and New Zealand were born.

There were certain ironies at today's observances. Kemal Atatürk first made his name as a Turkish commander at Gallipoli. Playing host today was President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who is systematically dismantling the modern secular state Kemal founded and replacing it with something harder and older, explicitly Islamic and slyly neo-Ottoman. The chumminess between him and the Prince of Wales was one of the queasier aspects of the day.

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